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The fundamental challenge confronting Africa is the fact that its people had spent too much time on the diagnosis of the continent’s problems and the prognosis of their conditions, the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, has noted.
 
According to him, the current difficulties confronting the continent were not merely to identify the best practices and approaches needed to establish democratic growth and development but rather it was “time for us to devote some time to practise what we preach”.

Diagnosing the problems that have impeded the rapid development of Africa over the years when he delivered a lecture at the British House of Commons in London last Wednesday, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II said the continent had the potential to become a world power provided the right conditions and proper leadership were in place.

He spoke at the launch of two books titled “All the Good Things Around Us: An Anthology of African Short Stories” and “May Their Shadows Never Shrink: Wole Soyinka and the Oxford Professorship of Poetry”.

They were jointly authored by Mr Ivor Agyeman-Duah, a former aid to former President John Agyekum Kufuor and Nana Ayebia, a Ghanaian-born publisher resident in Britain.

The book launch was in honour of a Nigerian playwright, poet, author, teacher and political activist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, Prof. Wole Soyinka.

Woes of Africa

Speaking on the theme: “Africa’s Democratic Dividend and the search for Economic Transformation”, the Asantehene said nearly 40 of the 50 countries within the erstwhile Organisation of African Unity (OAU) had military and dictatorial regimes that suppressed the rights of the people.

That situation, he said, deprived Africa the much needed human resource because scores of Africans in those countries fled the continent to relocate abroad for fear of their lives.

He buttressed his arguments when he singled out South Sudan as a country that had been plunged into civil war since its independence after breaking away from The Sudan.

The traditional leader contended that more than 100,000 people in South Sudan had been displaced, coupled with the killing of innocent people, adding that “it will take that country 20 years to function as a proper nation state.”